Cloud seeding is still a work in progresshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/cloud-seeding-is-still-a-work-in-progress
Wyoming just spent $14 million and the better part of 10 years on a rigorous scientific experiment to evaluate whether it’s possible to get extra snow from winter storm clouds through cloud seeding. The conclusion? The final results were thin: There was a 3 percent increase in precipitation, but a 28 percent probability that the cloud seeding had nothing to do with it.

Given the results of this and other winter weather-modification studies, the Bureau of Reclamation remains unimpressed. “As such,” said the agency in a draft analysis released in February, “the ‘proof’ the scientific community has been seeking for many decades is still not in hand.”

Proof in science requires a 95 percent probability of causality. But this standard is extremely difficult to achieve in complex atmospheric processes. Climate scientists, for example, mostly resort to asterisk-laden words such as “likely” to indicate lower levels of probability.

Cloud seeders, in turn, have labored under clouds of suspicion. Some of this is from decades of over-reaching claims made by commercial operators. Yet some meteorologists have also grumbled that cloud seeding is expected to deliver levels of probability that are not required when it comes to the science of climate change.

In Wyoming, in the realm of public policy, this lack of definitiveness has worked in ironic ways. Elected officials there have been moving to expand cloud seeding even though they lack convincing proof that it works. At the same time, many elected officials refuse to accept the existence of global warming, claiming lingering uncertainty in the science.

From the start, Wyoming’s cloud-seeding experiment was designed to ensure scientific rigor. Parallel mountain ranges southwest of Laramie, just north of the Colorado border, constituted the Wyoming laboratory. Propane was burned to loft silver iodide from ground-based generators into the clouds passing over the Sierra Nevada and Medicine Bow ranges. In the experiment, 154 storms during six winters had the temperatures needed for effective seeding, but only 118 developed adequate moisture content. And of those, 18 were tossed out because of contamination problems.

Dan Breed, project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which designed and oversaw the Wyoming experiment, said that failing to achieve a 95 percent confidence level in results is not unusual in cloud seeding studies. The fundamental problem, he says, involves the difficulty of measuring atmospheric processes.

The challenge inherent in the complexity of the data has prevented most climate scientists from directly linking specific weather events, such as the September 2013 floods in Colorado, to rising global temperatures, or even to the 3 to 5 percent observed moisture in the global atmosphere.

“When it comes to the atmosphere, there are just too many variables, and that variability just keeps rearing its ugly head when it comes to cloud seeding,” says Breed. “Even in this case, where we tried to make things as homogeneous as possible to reduce that variability, variability still kind of hurt us.”

Breed thinks research might better be invested in understanding the interaction in the atmosphere of wind, temperature and precipitation. For example, how likely is it that silver iodide or other seeding agents released from the ground will get into the clouds? True understanding of atmospheric processes, says Breed, has mostly come from observations instead of experiments -- because of that same variability.

This lack of certainty does not necessarily kill the prospects of cloud seeding, as is demonstrated by the continued interest of Wyoming legislators in funding projects. In the Colorado River Basin, cities and water districts seized upon the modeled projections of 5 to 15 percent snowpack augmentation as justification for continued or even expanded operations. Already, metropolitan Los Angeles, the Central Arizona Project and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, among others, pay for seeding clouds in Colorado, the source of half the water in the Colorado River, and last year they also paid to seed clouds in Wyoming, in the Green River drainage.

The Colorado River is notoriously strapped in its capacity to meet all of the wants and maybe even the needs of the millions of people who depend on it. River flows have declined 20 percent in the 21st century as compared to the last century. Though Breed won’t say that cloud seeding doesn’t necessarily work, he doesn’t see it as a game-changer for the Colorado River. Though cloud seeding can be a fairly straightforward, quick and inexpensive way to produce more water, its gains are marginal. It is not, he adds, a magic bullet: “It won’t solve the problem.”

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He writes in the Denver area of Colorado.

]]>No publisherWriters on the RangeOpinion2015/04/02 03:15:00 GMT-6ArticleConsidering historical correctness in New Mexico http://www.hcn.org/articles/considering-historical-correctness-in-new-mexico
Kit Carson’s name is everywhere on maps of the West. Nevada’s capital city is named after him, and in California, a Carson Pass crosses the Sierra Nevada. Colorado has Carson County, a town named Kit Carson and 14,000-foot Kit Carson Peak. But was the man himself really worth honoring?

A few years before Carson died in 1868, at a town in Colorado called Boggsville, he’d reluctantly fought the Navajo Indians in the Southwest, acting on behalf of the U.S. government. The brute strength of the U.S. Army prevailed, and in what the tribe remembers as their Long March, the defeated Navajos were forced onto a reservation in southeastern New Mexico.

That military campaign, and the long march in which so many Navajos died, continues to be remembered by some people with bitterness. This June, in New Mexico, for example, elected officials in Taos decided to remove Carson’s name from the 19-acre park, where he and his third and final wife, Josefa Jaramillo Carson, are buried.

Instead, the councilors renamed the park Red Willow, using the English translation of the Pueblo word for Taos. But after the Taos Pueblo objected, claiming proprietary use of the Red Willow name, the council restored Carson’s name, while also pledging to consider nominations for a new name in the hope that maybe there’s one out there that nobody will find objectionable.

It’s not surprising that New Mexico remains deeply conflicted about its history. Though the Spanish conquistadors of the 1500s and 1600s have been memorialized with statues of heroic-looking men on horseback, several of those statues have been vandalized and in some cases spray-painted with the words “murderer” and “killer.”

But even in Taos, not everybody agrees that Carson’s name should be forgotten. “The big backlash that I’m getting from this community is ‘Don’t we have bigger fish to fry beyond the renaming of the park?’ ” asked Councilman Andrew Gonzales in The Taos News. Another councilman conceded that the name change accomplishes little: “The problem we have with bigotry or intolerance or any of these issues or conflicts between cultures is not going to be settled by the naming of the park,” Fred Peralta told the same newspaper.

For its part, The New Mexican talked with Hampton Sides, who wrote a bestselling history of Carson’s campaign against the Navajos. His research for “Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West,” led Sides to develop a more nuanced view. “History is messy and fraught with contradictions,” he said. “It was a war that had its genesis in centuries of brutal raiding and kidnapping between the Navajos and the Spanish, a cycle of violence that the U.S. Army was seeking, in its own flawed way, to end.”

There’s also the question of how deeply we should examine the life of any geographic namesake. Sides points out that Lincoln, arguably our greatest president, authorized going to war against the Navajos.

In Colorado, Pitkin County, home to Aspen one of our most overtly liberal enclaves, is named after one of our most overtly exclusionist governors, Frederick Pitkin, who infamously proclaimed that the “Utes must go” – which they eventually did, driven at gunpoint from their homes. I live in Jefferson County, one of several in the West named after a man who was a wonderful writer, philosopher and scientist, as well as a cruel slave owner.

The Sand Creek Massacre that occurred 150 years ago this November provides cause for even more reflection. John Evans, then territorial governor, is remembered by a city of 20,000, a major avenue in Denver, and a14,000-foot peak. His actions leading up to Sand Creek, however, were not his most noble passage. So how many people lead such unblemished lives as to justify highways, mountains or buildings named in their honor?

I asked my friend, Wayne Trujillo, what he thought about the Kit Carson flap. Trujillo is of Swedish and German descent, and through his father’s New Mexico roots, Spanish and Indian as well. He said he didn’t want to sound indifferent, but all he cared about at the moment was completing his master’s degree and securing a job to pay off his student loans. In other words, while the past is interesting, the decisions we make today matter the most.

Meanwhile in Taos, the name of a Catholic priest has been suggested for the park that now bears Carson’s name, although others wonder where this push for historical correction will end. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that there’s also a Carson National Forest, a Carson electricalco-op, a Kit Carson Road and …

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. He is a writer in Denver.

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2014/08/26 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleHe’s the linchpin of a remote western Colorado townhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/hes-the-linchpin-of-a-remote-town
Take the Western boots off Don Colcord, add more trees to the main street of Nucla, Colorado, and you’d have the movie set for “It’s a Wonderful Life,” with Colcord, a pharmacist, playing Jimmy Stewart’s role as the principled banker of a small New England town.

But Colcord lives in arid western Colorado, in a town of 750 people, where he owns The Apothecary Shoppe. It’s two doors away from a little grocery that sells the bare essentials but little more. That’s Nucla in a nutshell.

The town was founded as an agricultural commune, but the commune disbanded. Agriculture continued, augmented at mid-century by uranium mining and processing. Colcord grew up at a nearby camp called Uravan in the 1950s and ‘60s, watching Sputnik inch its way across the star-filled night sky.

These days, Uravan has disappeared, following a lengthy Superfund cleanup, and Nucla, like so many small towns, barely hangs on.

“There’s not much there,” Colcord said of Nucla at Mountainfilm, a festival in Telluride, located 60 miles to the east.

Colcord had just been celebrated in a short documentary called “The Apothecary,” inspired by a profile written by writer Peter Hessler and published by The New Yorker in 2011. Hessler lived for a time in southwest Colorado and set out to describe a small town and its dynamics. Colcord emerged on the pages as the sort of selfless everyman who glues a community together.

Hessler’s piece revealed Colcord and perhaps Nucla as more complex than might be evident from a casual visit. For instance, Colcord is a loyal member of the National Rifle Association, which fits into the pattern of life in Nucla. Last year, the town board passed a law mandating ownership of guns. The law might be impossible to enforce, but it certainly mirrors local sentiments.

Colcord also has his own plane, and when he took Hessler up for a ride and put in a tape by the Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli, it made a deep impression on Hessler. The profile also made a deep impression on many readers. David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, called it one of the top magazine stories of the year. In Telluride recently, I asked Colcord how The New Yorker profile had changed his life.

“I had no idea the magazine had so many readers,” he said, adding that some of them had sent him money -- $3,000 altogether. Colcord had revealed that he writes off a substantial number of bills for prescriptions. In Nucla, times have been tough for decades. Yet many of the readers getting in touch with Colcord shared their wish to live a life like his -- in a small town community -- so long as there were jobs.

The film spawned by The New Yorker’s profile was an intimate picture of the druggist’s life. Filmmaker Helen Hood Scheer spent eight days with Colcord, showing him cracking jokes with customers, and later, reviewing some of their unpaid bills (“I must have ‘sucker’ written across my forehead.”) He also cleans his own house. (“I’d make somebody a good wife.”)

After the film was shown, Colcord talked about his guiding philosophies: “If people didn’t give, you couldn’t get.” And then this: “The only happiness you will ever have is making other people happy.”

His wife has been bedridden for several decades. In the film, he laments his own inability to relieve her pain. But in Telluride, he also revealed that, at age 63, he’d like to do other things with his life.

“Like everybody else, I’ve got a bucket list,” he said. With his wife incapacitated, though, he can’t travel. He also has a grandson to finish rearing. Anyway, he doesn’t know who would take over as the lone pharmacist for this on-the-edge town an hour from the nearest emergency room doctor.

Colcord is a hugger, and at one point he left the microphone in Telluride to hug one of his customers, who had just effusively thanked him. In his role as George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart reluctantly agrees to run the savings and loan in Bedford Falls, leaving others free to go off on more worldly adventures. It takes Clarence, the angel, to get Stewart to understand the good he has accomplished. After 20 showings, my eyes still brim with tears at the conclusion of this Hollywood story.

At Telluride, tears often filled Colcord’s eyes. It was a reaction to all the praise, but pain was mixed in. He seemed torn by the needs of family and community and by his own desires. Life on a pedestal is hard.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. From the Denver area, he publishes Mountain Town News.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2014/06/12 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe lessons of Ludlow, 100 years laterhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-lessons-of-ludlow-100-years-later
If April 20 is an informal holiday for celebrants of cannabis, members of labor unions observe the day more somberly. That’s especially true this year. One hundred years ago, striking coal miners and their families were killed in what’s now remembered as the Ludlow Massacre. It was the landmark catastrophe in the broader, nearly year-long struggle remembered as “The Great Coalfield War” of Colorado.

Striking miners back then harbored bitter complaints about company “pluck me” stores, and accused company men of cheating them at weigh stations. Worse, they felt mine managers cared nothing for their safety.

Death came easily in those underground mines. Rocks fell from underground ceilings, crushing men. Occasionally, methane or the coal dust itself ignited, killing scores or even hundreds of workers. Explosions were especially frequent in Colorado’s dry climate, partly why the state back then had double the national average of coal-mining deaths. Miners who survived these dangers could look forward to a slow death from black-lung disease.

Photograph by Allen Best.

But it was the miners’ own fault if they weren’t happy; after all, they had voluntarily gone to work. At least, that was the position of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the majority owner in Colorado Fuel and Iron, as well as other mine owners, including John Charles Osgood. That blithe assertion was contradicted in September 1913, however, when 80 percent of the miners in Ludlow went out on strike, vacating their company-owned houses and piling their families’ worldly possessions onto wagons.

Some 1,100-to-1,200 of the strikers and their families settled in for a long, snowy winter in white tents provided by the United Mine Workers at Ludlow, in southern Colorado. Occasionally, Mother Jones -- the famous labor agitator, who was then in her 70s -- passed by on a train between public appearances in Trinidad and Walsenburg. Her free speech came with a cost; she received jail terms in both towns. Most public officials sided with the wealthy mine owners.

The violence at Ludlow occurred a day after a festive Easter celebration at which some of the striking miners playing baseball while their wives hurled insults at the nearby Colorado National Guard.

No one will ever know who fired the first shot the next morning. The strikers were well armed and perhaps trigger-happy, and the militia was decidedly so, wheeling around a machine gun called the Death Special. The outcome was horrific: A boy fell first, and 11 children and two women later suffocated in pits underneath the tents after soldiers set fire to them. The militia lost one man and summarily executed three strikers, including strike leader Louis Tikas.

To avenge Ludlow in the following days, enraged strikers roamed from camp to camp in western Colorado, killing mine guards, strikebreakers, and others before federal troops arrived to restore uneasy order. The final death toll is uncertain, but altogether upwards of 75 would die in the violence, both miners and their foes. For the union, by then near bankruptcy, the struggle was over, and after Ludlow, death continued in the mines. Three years later, a nearby mine at Hastings exploded, killing 121 men and boys. Many more mine disasters followed.

This February, I visited Ludlow. It’s along a dusty road about a mile from Interstate 25, three hours south of Denver. The union has exhibits and a memorial, but the pits of death have been leveled. I found only prickly pear, cholla, and a few shards of pink-tinted glass. Up the canyons, at the old camps of Tabasco and Delagua, are old railroad grades, a few foundations and a granite memorial to the 121 victims at the Hastings coal mine.

Rockefeller was cast as the villain then, and judging by the comments at a Ludlow exhibit in Pueblo, Colo., people still blame him. Historians draw a more nuanced portrait of an individual who grew as he aged.

One museum visitor left a comment describing a family tree with roots on both sides of the coalfield war. Perhaps that comment hits closest to the truth. We all have carbon-smudged fingers. Our stories of the West are of horned bison and brown cows, frothy rivers and untamed wilderness, tended gardens and pastoral landscapes. Our art celebrates the individual prospectors, the brave trailblazers, the lonely cowboys, the stoic Indians.

We overlook our industrial lunch-pail moorings. As Thomas Andrews points out in “Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War” -- arguably the best of many good books about Ludlow -- our story is deeply intertwined with fossil fuels, coal being the first major source. The massacre at Ludlow was one outcome.

The late Randy Udall said that even a soccer mom today lives a life of luxury unimaginable to Cleopatra, who had all the slaves of Egypt at her beck and call. Energy is the difference. It’s at our peril that we forget that connection. It’s easy to hop in our cars to protest drilling. Ludlow reminds us of the hidden costs of what we call progress.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He lives in metropolitan Denver and publishes Mountain Town News.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2014/04/15 04:05:00 GMT-6Article77 years later, here comes pothttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/77-years-later-here-comes-pot
The history of marijuana is clouded by racism and muddled thinking.In 1936, the editor of a newspaper in Alamosa, Colo., wrote a letter to Henry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the federal government’s Bureau of Narcotics. The letter, introduced as evidence into a congressional hearing, informed Anslinger about a “sex-mad degenerate” who had recently “brutally attacked a young Alamosa girl” while under the influence of “marihuana,” as it was then spelled.

“This case is one of hundreds of murders, rapes, petty crimes, (and) insanity that has occurred in southern Colorado in recent years,” proclaimed Floyd K. Baskette, city editor of the Alamosa Daily Courier. “Can you do anything to help us?” And then this nasty bit of racism: “I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents.”

The next year, the U.S. Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which subjected sales of cannabis to taxation that required a permit. Soon after, a 23-year-old from Trinidad, Colo., named Moses Baca became the first person arrested under the new law. He was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. The second person nabbed was a 57-year-old laborer, Samuel Caldwell, who was convicted of selling three marijuana cigarettes in downtown Denver. He served two years in prison. So began our long adventure in the criminalization of marijuana.

The federal agency never issued a permit under that legislation, and in 1970, Congress defined marijuana as a controlled substance, further giving muscle to eradication efforts in 1973 by creating the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Now, of course, 20 states and the District of Columbia have allowed some use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, and in Colorado and Washington state, the federal government has chosen to ignore recreational use as long as the two states block sales to young people and control by cartels.

Figuring out how to govern this new use has been a fascinating challenge for Colorado during the last year. Many towns want nothing to do with marijuana; others embrace sales, and the taxes they generate. One ski town, Breckenridge, even expects to get $1 million in taxes this year. Most sales seem to be to tourists.

Denver fussed at length whether residents should even be able to smoke 420 -- that seems to be the name preferred by younger people -- on their own patios and porches. The answer, finally, was yes. But unlike liquor, there are no bars for cannabis in Colorado that I’m aware of.

I never particularly liked how marijuana affected me. I tended toward paranoia. Was that Johnny Carson on the TV making fun of me? Nor do I like how it affects others. It dulls, not sharpens. As with alcohol, the trick is moderation. Some do it better than others.

In voting for legalization, I hoped it would change the supply chain. The underground economy made cannabis lucrative, spawning mass murders in Mexico. In a sense, I voted for the psychoactive equivalent of the local food movement: Grow it local, smoke it local.

“Prohibition Ends,” proclaimed The Telluride Watch in the first days of January. Could this have turned out otherwise? Our sitting president, Barack Obama, openly admitted to smoking pot. George W. Bush deflected questions about drug use, saying: “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.” Bill Clinton, of course, responsibly chose not to inhale.

When I think of the past, what I find most interesting -- and disturbing -- was the logic we used to prohibit marijuana. It was the stuff of do-gooders. Various histories of the drug war point out that reformers associated marijuana with jazz musicians and others on the racial, economic and cultural margins of the American mainstream. By the 1960s, pot was linked to the “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture of rebellion. Tainted by these associations, the drug could then be targeted as a villainous erosion of American values, even safe society.

The letter from Alamosa in 1936 points not just to the pervasive racism of the time, but also to confusion about causality. According to that newspaper editor, back then, you could blame marijuana for sexual assault and even murder.

The American Medical Association in 1937 wanted more evidence before it agreed that marijuana should be banned, but Congress was in a rush. Evidence such as the letter from Colorado was enough. The 77-year lesson here is that it doesn't take leafy, herbaceous substances to make people muddleheaded. Even when we’re stone-cold sober, we’re fully capable of making stupid choices.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He publishes an e-zine from the Denver area called Mountain Town News.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2014/02/19 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGo Lambkins! But no go Redskins?http://www.hcn.org/wotr/go-lambkins-but-no-go-redskins
The controversial territory of mascot names.Mascots: Will we ever stop arguing about them? Consider Teton County in Idaho, where school Superintendent Monte Woolstenhulme said he was replacing the Redskins with a mascot less offensive to the Shoshonean people who originally inhabited that part of Idaho.

His announcement outraged many locals. Alumni protested loudly that their parents were Redskins, they had been Redskins, and by golly, their children would be Redskins, too. For now, Woolstenhulme, who has deep roots in the area, has retreated, but says he plans to revisit the issue.

Others besides Teton County residents have been struggling to decide what is an acceptable mascot. Protests continue about the Washington Redskins, the professional football team in our nation’s capital. Among us we also have various Savages, and you can be assured that the images used are not of mortgage bankers.

In Colorado, the Lamar High School Savages use an Indian profile similar to that of Teton County. As is common in high schools, the female teams are called the lady this and lady that, giving us the jarring juxtaposition of the Lady Savages as well as the Savage Cheerleaders.

No doubt, most locals in Lamar mean no disrespect to Native Americans when they use the name and mascot. Most schools choose something snarly and rambunctious to represent themselves. Unique are Colorado’s Fort Collins High School Lambkins, although the original lamb’s gentle visage has been replaced with a much fiercer face.

But consider this about Lamar: In 1864, one of the most horrific days in the history of the West occurred about 40 miles to the north. There, along Sand Creek, hundreds of defenseless Cheyenne and Arapahoe, some of them waving American flags, were killed by invaders from Denver who had betrayed their own promises of safety and sanctuary. If the word “savage” has any meaning, should it not be applied to one of those blood-lusting cavalrymen?

But then, that is usually the bizarre way of conquerors. We honor our vanquished foes by using their names, though with Native Americans, we were conflicted from the start, as is evident in the once-common phrase “the noble savages.” In Colorado, we named some of the state’s mountains after the Utes who were forced to leave the area. In Montana, this practice was followed in a different form. Despite its determined efforts to rid the landscape of Ursus horribilis, the state proudly dubbed its university the home of the Grizzlies.

In the Denver suburb of Arvada, where I live, the local high school team was originally called the Redskins. While this area was once the province of the Arapahoe and other tribes, the story is that the name derived from the red dye in football clothing, which rubbed off on the skin of players. The Redskins in the 1990s became the Reds, a name that surely would not have been accepted during the height of the Cold War, and that too has been replaced by the top-hatted, toothy but ultimately bland Bulldogs.

Most schools go for the generic, missing obvious opportunities. Colorado has the Deer Trail High School Eagles, instead of the Bucks and Does. In Casper, Wyo., the Natrona County High School Mustangs could easily be the Drillers or Roustabouts. And why should Roswell, N.M., be home to the Coyotes when it could be the Aliens, Extraterrestrials or Bug-eyed Invaders?

Occasionally, local heritage is acknowledged. Price, Utah, has the Carbon County Dinos, reflecting the area’s rich deposits of dinosaur bones. Arizona has the Yuma Criminals, because the state penitentiary is there, which is the same reasoning behind the Rawlins, Wyo., Outlaws. Elsewhere in Wyoming are the Big Piney Punchers, a nod to local ranching.

In Colorado’s mountains, we have the Aspen Skiers, the Clear Creek Golddiggers, and the Steamboat Sailors. On the plains, it’s the Rocky Ford Meloneers and the Brush Beetdiggers, the latter a nod to the sugar beets grown where I was born.

Maybe Idaho’s Teton County should take a cue from these farming communities. Teton County is now something of an exurb of Jackson Hole, but it wasn’t that long ago that students were dismissed for a week each October to help root out the seed potatoes that were, and still are, a big part of the local economy. Why not the Teton High School Spuds? Or Tubers? Or, perhaps best of all, the “Teton Taters”?

Come to think of it, Arvada High School missed a big opportunity when it chose Bulldogs as a mascot. This area once prided itself on growing Pascal celery. In my way of thinking, that would make us the Arvada Stalkers. Sounds menacing — the very point of high school mascot names.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He lives from Denver and publishes the e-zine, Mountain Town News.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2013/12/04 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA Colorado carpenter takes a chance on hemphttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.20/a-colorado-carpenter-takes-a-chance-on-hemp
Can an agrarian insurrection revitalize this High Plains town?This October, Ryan Loflin did what nobody in the United States has done in 55 years: He publicly harvested a crop of hemp. He deliberately ignored long-standing federal policy and bucked the advice of farm organizations, and his project was shunned by the state university set up to assist farmers.

The lanky, soft-spoken Loflin carried out this act of agrarian insurrection on 60 acres of his father's farm near Springfield, Colo., a town of 1,500 about 30 minutes from both Oklahoma and Kansas, in the heart of the Dust Bowl. Here, the scant trees lean away from the constant hard winds. A single wind turbine stands in the distance. There would be more, Loflin says, if there were power lines. Springfield clearly needs an economic boost. "Just look at Main Street," Loflin says: One steakhouse, four motels and many boarded-up storefronts. Could hemp be the answer?

It is, according to proponents, the answer for almost everything. Hemp can be used in products from rope to auto parts to plastics, shampoo to vitamin supplements. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written on paper made from its long fibers; our first three presidents – Washington, Adams and Jefferson – were hemp farmers. And the plant requires half or less the water that corn does, Loflin points out, making it better suited for the arid High Plains.

Standing in his field of chest-high hemp back in August, his reddish-blonde hair poking from under a sweat-stained Dragon Sheet Metal hat, Loflin explained that he inherited an entrepreneurial streak from his grandfather, who owned a string of Gibson's discount stores. Hemp could revitalize eastern Colorado's hardscrabble farm towns, he argued, which, like most in the Great Plains, have seen better days.

An exodus has been occurring for decades. After graduating high school in 1991, Loflin himself moved to Colorado's mountain resorts, first Breckenridge and then Crested Butte, where he now reclaims old barnwood for use in new homes. But when Colorado voters in 2012 legalized recreational marijuana – and, almost as an afterthought, the growing of hemp – he returned to his farming roots.

The story of hemp is inexorably linked with marijuana. They are both varieties of Cannabis sativa and have the same spiky leaves. But marijuana commonly contains between 3 and 30 percent tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the drug's psychoactive agent. As defined by Colorado's pending regulations, hemp can contain no more than 0.3 percent, enough to give you a headache, perhaps, but not a high.

The plant is essentially collateral damage in the nation's long war on drugs. In 1937, the Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act after Bureau of Narcotics head Henry J. Anslinger warned that "marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death." In defining "marihuana," however, that law exempted the mature stalks of the plant, fiber, oil or cake made from the seeds, and sterilized seeds. During World War II, the federal government actively encouraged farmers to grow hemp for ropes.

The 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act contained the same definition of marijuana, but also made hemp a Schedule I controlled substance, illegal to grow without a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has declined to award them.

Federal policy was further muddled in August, when U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole notified federal prosecutors that blocking landmark marijuana legalization laws in Colorado and Washington would not be a priority. However, the Justice Department had previously reneged on promises that it would look the other way on medical marijuana in California and Montana.

Given this murky legal landscape, Colorado State University, the state's land-grant school, has avoided hemp the way somebody might cross a street to avoid an aggressive panhandler. Legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder, would give it and other universities cover for research and protect federal research grants. Despite support from libertarian conservatives, the bill has languished. Similarly, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union warned its members against planting this year and risking the loss of federal crop insurance.

Just how much hemp will mean for rural incomes is open to debate; the U.S. market – which may amount to some $500 million – is currently supplied by imports. "Nobody is going to suddenly get rich and retire by growing hemp," says Mick McAllister, director of communications for the Farmers Union.

Loflin has squirreled away seeds from October's harvest for an even larger planting next year and hopes to at least partially fill orders from Whole Foods and Dr. Bronner's, which makes natural soap. Other farmers in Springfield, including his two cousins, also may plant next year. Last May, as Loflin prepared to sow, he said he suspected that federal drug agents had other things to think about than his farm. So far, his theory has held up.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryColorado2013/12/03 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleTelluride voters will find sugar on the ballothttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/telluride-voters-will-find-sugar-on-the-ballot
The pros and cons of banning sugary sodas in a mountain resort town of Colorado.In my impressionable youth, I believed that there was an “r” in Washington. We “warshed” clothes, and however you might spell it, Colorado was pronounced “Colorada,” which is east of “Hawi-yah.”

Growing up in Fort Morgan, Colo., I also remember the treat of having a 7-Up, a Pepsi-Cola or some other kind of “pop.” When I first heard the word “soda,” I wasn’t sure what the person was talking about.

Later, spending my first year of college in “Missoura,” I heard a clamor one night in the dormitory. It was in Jefferson City, the state capital, located midway between the two largest cities, Kansas City and St. Louis.

“Pop,” came one yell, from one hallway. “No, it’s soda,” was the answer from the other side. And so the rival chants grew like cheers at a football game.

I was reminded of that night recently while reading about a local tax proposal in Telluride, Colo. Voters this November will be asked to enact a 1 cent per ounce tax on all sugary drinks, including “soda,” according to the two local newspapers, The Telluride Watch and Daily Planet. (Imagine, a small town having two competing newspapers when Denver can barely support one daily.)

Supporters argue that a tax is necessary because sugar is a bad thing for human health. Most of us know that both sodas and pops (or whatever you call them) are loaded with sugar, mostly from corn fructose. So are the energy drinks that now crowd grocery aisles. A speaker at a recent forum in Telluride demonstrated this in a dramatic way, displaying a one-quart Mason jar two-thirds full of granulated sugar. That, said Harold Goldstein, of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, is how much sugar you consume if you have a soda (pop) every day of the week.

Another speaker, Jeff Ritterman, a cardiologist in California, noted that the number of overweight children and obese adults in the United States has doubled over the past 30 years. Much of that increase, he said, can be attributed to the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.

“When we pour the soda, we pour on the pounds,” he said. Other results: tooth decay and type 2 diabetes. Tax opponents respond to these arguments by saying that sugar consumption should be a matter of personal choice; the nanny state can keep its sticky fingers to itself.

This is a difficult argument no matter which side you’re on, simply because most of us resist absolutist positions. Remember Prohibition? Everyone agrees it was a gigantic failure. The so-called war on drugs has lasted much longer, and it, too, has been a colossal failure with cruel consequences. The very first casualty of the 1937 law that made possession and sale of marijuana a federal offense was an unemployed laborer in Denver. He spent several years in federal prison in Kansas for selling one marijuana cigarette. Thousands of others have similarly imprisoned for crimes that, at least in Colorado and Washington, are no longer considered crimes.

How about cocaine, heroin, LSD and methamphetamines? On these drugs, and many others, we still draw a hard line. In the case of methamphetamines, there’s a good argument to be made that widespread use has harmful consequences to society. Users tend to get violent. What about heroin? It exacts a terrible individual cost. But what harm does it do to society, save that addicts too often commit crimes to come up with money for their next fix?

If any sugar addicts have busted car windows to steal items that can be sold for their next fix, I haven’t heard of it. But it’s undeniable that sugar has a serious impact on our total health care costs. Long before Obamacare (a term I use without disparagement), the costs of sugar-caused sicknesses such as diabetes were socialized because they were borne by society as a whole.

To the credit of McDonald’s, the fast-food chain now posts the caloric content of its various goods, including soft drinks. I wish other restaurants also shared the calorie count of their food; it would help us make more informed food choices.

If I lived in Telluride, however, I’d probably vote against this “sin” tax, whether they called the sugary drink in question soda or pop. It is certainly true that Americans have a sugar addiction, and like most addictions, it has harmful consequences. But does that mean we need a law against it? Let people decide for themselves.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in the Denver area and publishes an e-zine called Mountain Town News.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the Range2013/10/29 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleIn describing weather, remember the caveatshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/in-describing-weather-remember-the-caveats
The numbers get squirrely when it comes to explaining massive flooding.Do you know how to make a meteorologist squirm? Ask for hard numbers immediately after a flood or a big rainfall, especially something like the September deluge that drenched many parts of Colorado’s Front Range with 10 inches of rain in just a few days. In some places, up to 18 inches of rain fell, most of it within the space of 36 hours.

Almost immediately there came a report that this was a 100-year flood in Boulder. Well, no, said a later report; it was more like a 50-year flood, and possibly less. Maybe it was a 100-year flood somewhere else. Check with us in a few months.

Others -- including meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- announced that it was a 1,000-year rainfall. Really? A thousand years is an awful long time. What about the massive flooding of 1938, others wanted to know? Where does that rank in the scheme of things?

If the great deluge of 2013 in Colorado revealed anything, it was that the science of rainfall, flooding and even global warming is still imprecise. We all want clear answers and instant tabulations, the way that a website can report page visits and even the locations of viewers. Most of the time, however, the hard sciences can’t give us the hard numbers and precise explanations that we crave.

“Be very careful about historical frequencies, because what gets published the first day gets remembered forever,” said Nolan Doesken, Colorado state climatologist, at a recent forum organized by the government consortium, Western Water Assessment.

Doesken pointed to the Big Thompson flood of 1976, in which 12 to 14 inches of rain fell in just a few hours, creating a giant surge of about 32,000 cubic feet of water per second. Some 143 people died as a result. At the time, it was described as a 100-year flood. But an expert in evaluating flooding, who later methodically examined the canyon, concluded that nothing comparable had occurred since the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago.

Historical records have been kept in Colorado for only a little more than 100 years. And yet we know that giant storms have occurred many times over the centuries. Every year, Colorado has remarkable deluges somewhere within its borders.

“Throughout history, we have had monsters pretty often somewhere in the state,” Doesken said. “I think there are 50 100-year floods each year somewhere in Colorado.”

Scientists would like something other than the simple description of “100-year” floods in favor of a more complicated evaluation that emphasizes the actual frequency of major incidents. Too often, a 50-year flood is assumed to mean that such an event happens every 50 years, almost like clockwork, though in fact two so-called 50-year floods can occur two years in a row.

“We’re trying to get away from all those aging atlases,” said Kelly Mahoney, a research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, based at the University of Colorado. “But after a day or two of staying away from (the hard numbers), those numbers (still) flow to the top.”

Mapping of floodplains is also imprecise, in part because the construction of buildings and other alterations over time have changed the flow of water. Mahoney said identified floodplains are “constructs, and not determinations of truths for all time.”

Sometimes, floods occur in places that have never before been identified as floodplains. Such was the case in 1997, when a deluge swamped Fort Collins, killing several people. The water ran in “entirely new channels -- very subtle channels -- that had not been identified,” noted Doesken. The basement of Morgan Library at Colorado State University got swamped, for example, though it’s nowhere near a creek. “Flash floods can happen anywhere.”

Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist who specializes in climate dynamics at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, made the same point, in a more general way.

“Caveats can get in the way of sound bites,” he said. “As scientists, caveats is all we do.”

Can global warming explain at least part of this deluge? The answer seems to be a definite “maybe.” As Hoerling put it, “I am skeptical that you can include or exclude climate change. Our models just aren’t good enough.”

Globally, the atmosphere contains an estimated 5 percent more moisture than it did 50 years ago. In the Boulder area, just prior to the recent storm, there was a great deal of water vapor -- 150 to 200 percent more than normal. But how much did that added water vapor contribute to making it a 1,000-year event, at least in some places?

“It is a factor, but still a very small factor,” said Hoerling. In other words, weird weather has been with us for a very long time.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He covers environmental and other issues from Denver.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityWriters on the Range2013/10/10 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWe need a locagua movementhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/we-need-a-locagua-movement
Whole Foods Market earlier this year opened a store in the Colorado mountain town of Frisco. Located at 9,097 feet, it can boast it’s the chain’s highest-elevation outlet.

Like each of the 393 other Whole Foods markets, the Frisco store goes out of its way to emphasize local connections. In a nod to Frisco’s four ski resorts, brightly decorated skis and snowboards direct customers to check-out lines, while local trees killed by mountain pine beetles have been fashioned into blue-stained wooden tables.

Local origins of food also get prime time on every aisle. This is especially prominent in the meat section. There, a giant wall poster explains that the store’s chicken comes from 109 miles away, its beef from 110 miles, and the pork from 220 miles.

Yet for bottled water, inverse logic prevails, and few of the 20 varieties come from Colorado. One comes from Mexico, another from Italy. You can also buy water from Northern California and that chimera of desert sizzle, Las Vegas. That thirsty Las Vegas can export water is a strong statement about marketing; its Get Real! brand boasts of negative ionization to “help your body restore balance, improve health and reach your full potential.”

Las Vegas gets only four inches of precipitation a year and long ago exhausted its aquifers from the last Ice Age. So nearly all of its water comes from the Colorado River, impounded behind Hoover Dam in Lake Mead. The specter of worsening drought has now made the reservoir so unreliable that the Southern Nevada Water Authority is boring a new tunnel into the reservoir -- its third. Intake for the newest tunnel, drilled at a cost of $817 million, will emerge from the very bottom of the riverbed, should the reservoir dry up completely.

The irony is that some of Lake Mead’s supply comes from creeks around Frisco. Its new Whole Foods store is within a quarter-mile of Tenmile Creek, which roared with recently melted snow from 13,000-foot peaks when I visited in mid-June. Water from Tenmile travels some 1,000 miles before arriving at Las Vegas. Italy is an even more significant supplier of bottled water at Whole Foods, and cases of Italian water clogged the aisles when I visited. I wondered: Did it rain a lot in Italy last winter? No; a promotional website called Life in Italy explains that “these waters spend years if not decades or centuries trapped underground, absorbing nutrients and minerals as they pass through rich soil, limestone or volcanic rock. …”

Water released by some Colorado mountains is mineralized, too. Hardrock mining has left some creeks with elevated concentrations of zinc, magnesium and other minerals. Most of it has been cleaned up thanks to federal Superfund legislation.

But Frisco’s water? I’d drink it in a second; in fact, I already do. Metropolitan Denver can boast that it gets most of its water from mountain creeks as pure as the driven snow. So why buy water from the other side of the planet when the best is local? Shipping water great distances isn’t anything new. New York City’s water comes from upstate in the Adirondack Mountains. There’s no way metropolitan Los Angeles could support 18 million people without the very expensive and energy-intensive pumping of water from Northern California, as well as from the Colorado River.

Exurban areas of Denver and Colorado Springs, exhausting local sources, have even begun talking about pumping water more than 400 miles from a reservoir on the Utah-Wyoming border. Environmentalists call it a boondoggle, but really, is it any crazier than the swimming pool of water I see at my local Costco in the form of bottled water from France, the South Pacific and California?

Why would anybody think that California water is better than locally sourced Colorado water? I suspect it’s the same people who cheer the Los Angeles Lakers when they play the Denver Nuggets in downtown Denver. I’ll grant you that our liquor stores are full of water, in the form of wine, from around the world. I buy wine from Australia because it best matches my low income as a writer. Whole Foods, aptly nicknamed Whole Paycheck, appeals to a higher-income crowd. Maybe the same customers who insist on local meat somehow assume that pricey imported water guarantees a better product.

The locavore movement has made its mark, and it’s evident everywhere, from the omnipresent farmers’ markets to the big signs at Whole Foods. Studying those cases of water hauled across the ocean to the spine of the Rocky Mountains, I wonder if it’s also time for a locaqua movement.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. Based in Denver, he publishes an e-zine called Mountain Town News and writes frequently about water and energy.

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2013/10/03 05:15:00 GMT-6ArticleHard choices for an uncertain futurehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/hard-choices-for-an-uncertain-future
After seeing a talk by climate activist Tim DeChristopher, the author wonders: which energy source is the lesser of many evils?Stepping onto the stage of the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colo., his biceps bulging after chopping vegetables six hours a day for 21 months while in prison, Tim DeChristopher got a standing ovation for an act of insurrection.

DeChristopher became the public face of climate-change activism in 2008 with an audacious act of principled defiance. At an auction in Salt Lake City overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, he successfully bid $1.8 million for mineral leases near Utah’s Arches National Park. But he never had any intention of paying; he simply meant his bidding to be an act of civil disobedience.

Edward Abbey, who worked as a seasonal park ranger at Arches in the 1950s, coined a term for guerrilla tactics like this: monkey-wrenching. Like Abbey, DeChristopher grew up in Pennsylvania before migrating to the Southwest, where he worked as a backcountry guide between university studies in Arizona and Utah. Abbey’s fictional heroes, however, operated by stealth to save desert landscapes threatened by mining and dams.

DeChristopher, as portrayed in Bidder 70, a documentary film by Beth and George Gage, wanted everyone to know exactly what he was doing and why. He refused to plead guilty in exchange for a 30-day sentence, angling for the public stage of a federal court. There, he hoped to argue that his act of civil disobedience was a reasonable response to the threat of human-caused global climate change. The federal judge nixed that lesser-of-two-evils argument, and the jury convicted him. Now free for a little more than a month, DeChristopher told the gathering at Telluride’s Mountainfilm festival that he’ll soon attend the Harvard Divinity School.

His father, Jeff DeChristopher, who was in the audience at Telluride, said he’d urged his son to take the plea. “I felt he was throwing away his life. A felony is a lifetime thing. I remember saying something like, ‘Well, I hope somebody sends you a Christmas card.’ But this weekend, all of you, have really changed my mind on that.” Then the father, starting to choke up, stopped himself. On stage, his son wiped his eyes.

DeChristopher framed his sacrifice as a moral issue. But it’s also a complicated issue. He tried to block the development of natural gas to draw attention to the dangers of global climate change. Because of its reduced carbon footprint, however, natural gas is generally seen as the lesser of yet another evil -- coal.

Examining this teeter-totter of risk, filmmaker Robert Stone was on hand to nominate nuclear energy as his climatic hero. This was surprising, given that his anti-nuclear weapons documentary, Radio Bikini, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988. But his new film, Pandora’s Promise, he said that only by tapping nuclear energy could we hope to tamp down greenhouse-gas emissions while powering a world population growing briskly toward 9 to 10 billion. The risk of climate change, he said, is greater than the risk of nuclear energy, and he argued that France, which is 80 percent carbon-free because of its nuclear-based electrical grid, was the better model than Germany and Denmark, both cited for their renewables but still heavily reliant on coal.

That argument, however, ignores the long shadow of the Cold War. Uranium mining damaged human health to a still-unknown extent. Southwestern Colorado today has dozens of “uranium widows.”

Even so, there’s strong local support for renewed uranium processing 80 miles west of Telluride. A lovely but difficult movie called Uranium Drive-In, directed by Suzan Beraza, delivered a respectful platform for these voices. Sounding resourceful and self-reliant, residents said they were desperate for jobs, and they saw any environmental risks, which they disputed anyway, as secondary.

After the Uranium Drive-in showing, Don Colcord, a pharmacist in Nucla, one of the hardscrabble western Colorado towns that wants a uranium mill, made a surprising comment. He said that ultra-liberal Telluride and his conservative town of Nucla shared some common ground. It was certainly not the notorious news that Nucla recently became the first town in Colorado to require every household to own a gun. It was the likelihood that global warming will produce less snow for skiing, on which Telluride depends, as well as for farming, on which his community still relies to some extent. That understanding, he said, could lead to agreement about nuclear power.

Everybody, it seems, is arguing for the lesser of two evils. If only we could agree on what the greater evil is.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeWriters on the Range2013/06/13 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAspen, Colo. environmental community split over small hydro http://www.hcn.org/issues/45.6/aspen-colo-environmental-community-split-over-small-hydro
Reviving a small hydroelectric plant on Castle Creek was supposed to help the city's utility get closer to providing 100 percent carbon free electricity as part of an effort to fight climate change. Instead, it's kicked up a furor.Last summer's Fourth of July parade in the resort town of Aspen, Colo., was apple-pie middle America. There were Rotarians and librarians, prancing horses and dirt bikers. The mayor passed out flags. Cheers erupted as veterans passed, their signs like bookmarks in American history from World War II to Afghanistan.

Then came some unusual floats: "Aspen hydro fish-cally irresponsible," said one sign. Another: "When we divert, the stream gets hurt." Finally, on a convertible: "Protecting Nature is Patriotic."

Inside, draped in an American flag, sat Connie Harvey. The matriarch of Aspen's environmental community wore hiking shorts and a visor snuggled into her whitening hair. Since settling in Aspen in 1958, she's fought against miners, loggers, even the local ski company on behalf of wilderness and rivers -- often with local politicians on her side.

But those allies have become adversaries. In a move that splintered Aspen's enthusiastic environmental community, city officials began developing a small hydroelectric plant that would partially dewater short sections of two popular mountain streams next to town, Maroon and Castle creeks, one of which flows by Harvey's home. Harvey calls it a "devastating attack" that threatens a "thriving complex of aquatic and terrestrial life." Her views are shared by American Rivers, state and local chapters of Trout Unlimited, and a group called "Saving our Streams" made up of Castle Creek property owners.

The city holds that environmental impacts would be minimal, and that the 1.175-megawatt Castle Creek Energy Center is key to generating more energy locally from clean sources. The city utility, which delivers half of Aspen's electricity, will soon be 89 percent carbon-free, thanks to the imminent addition of turbines to an existing Colorado dam. Castle Creek would bring it nearly to its goal of 100 percent carbon-free by 2015.

In November, after a barrage of advertising, some of it from unidentified Castle Creek hydro opponents, Aspenites narrowly voted to abandon the project. The vote was advisory -- not legally binding -- but for now, hydro is stalled as the city considers its options.

It was supposed to be an easy part of Aspen's Canary Initiative, which laid out steps to improve energy efficiency and boost renewable energy to reduce local carbon emissions 30 percent by 2020 as compared to 2004 levels, and 80 percent by 2050. Aspen is vulnerable to climate change because its four ski areas depend on long, snowy winters; the resorts also give the city a pulpit. "We think that, while we can't turn around the situation globally, we can deliver a powerful message to an influential group of visitors," says Mayor Mick Ireland.

But as the fight over even this small hydro project shows, such ambitions are proving difficult to execute here and elsewhere as communities grapple with competing environmental values, institutional barriers, financial limits and general resistance to change. Aspen was supposed to have reduced its total greenhouse gas emissions 11 percent by 2011, says Canary Initiative director Lauren McDonell, but it's only about halfway there. And "it's getting increasingly challenging to move the needle."

Aspen was the first town west of the Mississippi with hydroelectric streetlights. The controversial new proposal would use the same footprint of existing reservoirs, dams and pipeline routes from a small plant on Castle Creek that provided nearly all of Aspen's electricity from 1892 to 1958, when the city began buying cheaper power from sources elsewhere in the West, including coal plants.

Aspen got back in the hydro business in the mid-'80s for environmental reasons, installing turbines in Ruedi Dam, 20 miles away. That project, another small plant on Maroon Creek several miles upstream of Aspen, and other dams in the West supplied Aspen's municipal utility with roughly 42 percent of its electricity in 2011; another 30 percent came from wind, primarily in Nebraska.

The city stepped up efforts to scrub its power supply in 2006; climate models had begun suggesting narrowed ski seasons by 2050, and perhaps no skiing by 2100. According to a city study, the number of frost-free summer days has expanded from 73 to 107 during the quarter-century before 2008.

Given the existing infrastructure and Aspen's hydro-savvy, reviving the old Castle Creek plant seemed the most immediately attainable goal in the city's climate strategy. In 2007, a large majority of voters authorized $5.5 million in bonds for the project. Steel pipes 42 inches across and stretching 4,000 feet would replace the old wood flumes. Water would be diverted upstream of Aspen into a small reservoir, then down through the pipes to a new power plant smaller than many Aspen houses.

Nobody disputes the availability of water during spring runoff. Even after existing diversions, peak Castle Creek flows average 650 cubic feet per second (cfs), and Maroon's average 750. The new plant would divert up to 52 total cfs. The problem lies in low-flow months, mostly during winter, when Castle averages 15 cfs, and Maroon 25. Despite holding more senior rights, the city promised to keep flows at or above 12 cfs in Castle and 14 in Maroon, in accordance with the state's instream flow rights. A city study found "no measurable impacts" were expected to stream health, the fish community or macroinvertebrates from the reduced flows, but two Pitkin County studies found the city's data too narrow to draw confident conclusions.

----

Besides, hydro opponents like Harvey and others insist that ensuring minimum instream flow is no guarantee. "The science of stream ecology has conclusively shown that maintaining a minimum flow will not keep a stream healthy," says Ken Neubecker former president of Colorado Trout Unlimited. And saying the streams' health must be sacrificed to fight climate change is, he adds, akin to the Vietnam War logic of destroying villages to save them.

Some also accuse the city of trying to circumvent federal review. In 2008, Aspen applied for a licensing waiver from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which permits hydroelectric proposals, claiming a simple resumption of the decommissioned plant. FERC had suggested the waiver was a possibility but denied the application because the city had abandoned the plant. In 2010 the city began building one of the reservoir pipelines that would feed the hydro project, arguing that it was a necessary emergency drainline, and applied for a waiver from FERC environmental review. Others saw devious intentions. "We know when somebody is trying to cheat," says John Seebech, Washington D.C.-based director of American Rivers' Hydropower Reform Initiative.

As the fight over the hydro plant dragged on, costs nearly doubled to $10.5 million by last summer. Still, Castle Creek would deliver extremely low-cost power over the 75- to 100-year life of the plant, says City Manager Steve Barwick.

Owners of water rights in Castle Creek, including fossil fuel magnate Bill Koch, have even sued Aspen on grounds that it abandoned its water rights for hydroelectric production when it decommissioned the old plant.

The power the city wants can easily be generated elsewhere, at solar or wind farms, Harvey said soon after her Fourth of July appearance last summer. "I'm sure they meant well when they started this, but they're so locked into it."

Auden Schendler, vice president for sustainability with the Aspen Skiing Co., calls it an "iconic battle between those who really get climate change and the need for immediate action and models for success, and those who did great work fighting traditional environmental battles but who are misunderstanding or deprioritizing the crux issue of our time."

Aspen is hardly alone in struggling to shrink its carbon dependence. Inspired by the 2005 example of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, more than 1,000 mayors in the United States -- including 64 in the Rocky Mountain states -- have launched efforts to attain the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. That agreement committed participants to make their best efforts to knock back greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent by 2012 as compared to 1990 levels. Inventories will not be completed until this summer, although it appears the rapid switching from coal power to natural gas may help a larger number of communities than expected meet the target, officials say. Otherwise, even tiny successes have been hard-earned, and big actions can be enormously difficult.

Boulder, Colo., adopted the nation's first carbon tax and pioneered a program making it easier for homeowners to borrow money for energy efficiency upgrades and renewables. Still, it's only halfway to Kyoto's short-term goal, and Boulder regional sustainability manager Jonathan Koehn says officials are now looking to rapidly decarbonize the electrical supply. The city may split from the privately owned utility now serving it to produce its own electricity, but the path is uncertain.

Portland, Ore., is among the exceptions. Despite population growth of 25 percent, Portland's emissions are about 8 percent below 1990 levels. "As of 2010, we were on track -- but not with a lot of room for error," says Michael Armstrong of the city's planning and sustainability department. He attributes the successes to land-use policies, integrated transportation, improved energy efficiency, and a shift to cleaner energy sources.

Ruthie Brown is one of the Aspen hydro project's staunchest backers. Her grandfather helped install the original plants. "There's no doubt that it can be done in an environmentally sound way," she says.

With that in mind, Brown helped convene a mediation session in 2011. The resulting agreement calls for the plant to sit idle during low-flow months for three years while more data on the relationship between stream health and flow levels are collected. Local government and state wildlife representatives would then decide whether to allow greater diversions. Impacts would be evaluated again after the sixth year. Only then, and after a unanimous vote, would the project operate at full capacity.

But with the plant now in limbo, the city council is unsure how to proceed. In January, officials invited the public to submit alternative projects, so long as they fit within the 2015 Canary deadline. In response, they got a 35-page earful from local heavy-hitter Amory Lovins, longtime climate activist and founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute -- a nonprofit that promotes more efficient use of resources. "A cheaper or otherwise superior solution that takes longer to complete may provide greater net public good," he wrote, advising the city to keep improving energy efficiency instead of continuing with the hydro plant.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryClimate Change2013/04/24 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleSmug alerthttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/smug-alert
None of us are without sin when it comes to using energy.Perhaps drilling rigs should be allowed in cities, towns and even into our own metaphorical backyards. It would be good for the environment. Maybe not your personal environment, but more broadly for our environment.

Community planners for decades have urged mixed-use development, in which we combine work, play and shopping in closer physical proximity. Lately, we’ve expanded the idea to food. Some people have always supplemented their pantry with backyard gardens, and now we have the concept more formally called “urban agriculture,” a phrase that embraces in-town farms.

Growing your own victuals feels good and connects you more directly with the weather and changing climate. Soil fertility becomes something personal, and creepy-crawly things a delight or demons, depending upon their role in your personal ecosystem.

Energy, however, remains an abstraction – and many people would like to keep it that way. In Colorado, several cities have adopted limits. Now, Fort Collins has banned fracking, which amounts to a ban on drilling, as few wells are drilled these days without fracking. In fairness to those municipalities, legitimate concerns remain about the technology’s impacts on water and air quality.

Yet the bigger picture is that we all use natural gas. Milk doesn't originate in a carton, nor water in a faucet. With natural gas, it’s even worse. We never actually see, smell or taste the gas, only the heat it produces or, in the case of electricity, the light it provides or the cool air from conditioners. That’s a huge disconnect. Bridging that gap would be useful.

Consider the debate in Carbondale, Colo. Locals have high regard for a nearby area called Thompson Divide, where they graze their cattle, go mountain biking, and hunt wildlife. I can’t vouch for it personally, but I take them on their word that it’s a special place.

Carbondale, however, wasn’t named after somebody named Bill Carbon. Coal was mined intermittently in the Thompson Divide area for a century, and drillers have poked around there previously and perhaps not delicately so. Now comes the question of whether the federal government will issue extensions for drilling in the basin.

The Aspen Times, reporting on a recent meeting attended by 300 people, said the current quandary was best summarized by a local student. While everyone who uses natural gas must, at some level, support energy extraction, she said, some places should be off-limits. And Thompson Divide is one of them.

OK, fair enough. But then came another local resident who warned of the “wolf at the door” that had already devoured half of his county with drilling. And, reports the Times, he got a resounding “no” when he asked the crowd if it was worth “poisoning the Earth” to extract more natural gas to feed the country’s addiction to fossil fuels.

It turns out that one protector of the last, best places commutes to the West Coast, where he oversees the manufacturing and retailing of a well-known line of outdoor clothing. That requires a 2,000-mile commute: Your very own carbon footprint the size of Poland.

In reading about the Carbondale meeting, I was reminded of the 2006 “South Park” episode called “Smug Alert,” in which the local residents buy “Pious” cars, which makes them feel smug. Then clouds of “smug” originating from Hollywood, San Francisco and South Park threaten to converge over the Rocky Mountains in an apocalypse of self-righteousness.

It’s easy to be smug about drilling for natural gas. Legitimate questions from citizens haven’t fully been answered by industry and state regulators, and it’s not clear that standards and oversight have been strengthened enough to protect the environment. If this is indeed going to be the giant bridge fuel to deliver us into a renewable future, it needs some work.

But how can we say no, no, no to drilling, when our actions say yes, yes, yes to the demand that drives the drilling? Carbondale and Pitkin County don’t want drilling at Thompson Divide? Fair enough. Like Fort Collins, they’re ahead of the curve in energy-efficiency programs. But to say absolutely no to drilling? They’d need to say no to energy use, too. Mandating passive-home construction that tamps down energy use to almost nothing would be one major step.

Right now, we all have grime on our hands from drilling. But for some people, the grime seems to be invisible. Maybe a drilling rig down the street would at least remind us of the part we all play in this dirty business.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in the Denver area and publishes Mountain Town News, an online newsmagazine.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2013/03/19 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleKeystone XL is still a questionable pipelinehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/keystone-xl-is-still-a-questionable-pipeline
As the pipeline route is decided, ranchers worry about impacts to water quality in the case of spillsBesides repealing “Obamacare,” Mitt Romney has said he would issue a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his very first day as president. That’s an interesting statement from a candidate who, when it comes to other issues, portrays himself as a standard-bearer for states’ rights. In this case, he seems to be saying that as soon as oil crosses an international border, local concerns go out the window. Of course, on other occasions –- as when immigrants cross international borders –– local concerns count for a whole lot more.

Keystone XL would originate in the Canadian province of Alberta, pumping the heavy, tar-like substance called bitumen, then picking up oil from the Bakken shale while slicing through Montana and South Dakota. It’s when the pipeline crosses into Nebraska that it runs into political trouble.

Protests were few when TransCanada, the pipeline company, laid the pipeline that was called Keystone I across Nebraska. But then, right after the route selection, there came the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a giant spill of bitumen crude in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, and a ruptured pipe in the Yellowstone River. All raised questions about oil safety. The Kalamazoo spill particularly sharpened concerns over whether bitumen, because of its corrosive and acidic qualities, poses special hazards in pipeline transport.

Pipeline safety is a federal responsibility. Whether federal standards are up to snuff for bitumen is an open question, though. Congress has directed further study, a task delegated to the National Academy of Sciences, with a report due in 2013 –– probably an after-the-fact event if Romney gets elected.

Pipeline routing, by contrast, is normally a state responsibility. In this case, the U.S. State Department must approve the pipeline because it would cross the international border from Canada. Routing across the individual states is basically a state and local matter. In Nebraska, routing is subject to environmental review, now under way in a partnership between the State Department and the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality.

Last fall, Republicans in Congress put President Barack Obama on the spot by demanding a decision. Sidestepping, he denied the permit in January but invited TransCanada to apply with a new route. In April, TransCanada did just that. This new route gives a wider berth to the Sand Hills as they are defined by the Environmental Protection Agency. But it avoids neither sand nor high water tables.

In early May, while doing research for a story, I visited a ranch along the Niobrara River that would be crossed by this new proposed route of Keystone XL. It’s in the Midwest, east of the 100th meridian, but the setting has a wilder, more untamed feel to it. On the ranch of Karl Connell, I dug into the ground and found it to be sandy and wet, like what you’d put in a bowl for a pet turtle. The water table was just a few feet below ground. In other words, at least a portion of this new route looks very much like the old route. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman supports the pipeline, but Nebraskans remain divided.

John K. Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, one of the organizations fighting the pipeline, sees Romney’s support for quickly building the pipeline as rife with hypocrisy.

“Here is a guy who on one hand is railing against the excesses of the heavy-handed federal government,” he said. “Yet they don’t bat an eye when they’re getting ready to ram an international pipeline down the throats of landowners and the state, without any regard for siting authority or the use of eminent domain.”

The suggestion that the bitumen will make the United States more energy independent also seems fanciful. Some critics think it would end up as diesel and be exported to world markets. TransCanada’s promise of 20,000 jobs has also been questioned; at any rate, after construction is completed, just a few dozen lasting jobs will remain.

In Nebraska, the cattle ranchers I met took a long view. Many who have lived on the land for four generations say they want better assurances that hasty decisions won’t imperil their land and water. “If you don’t take care of your land, it won’t take care of you,” a rancher told me. “You don’t take care of your water, you don’t have anything.”

None of this, of course, can be boiled down into a 30-second campaign ad promising a quick fix.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes about natural resource issues from the Denver area.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2012/10/08 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGlobal climate change: We need to talk about ithttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/global-climate-change-we-need-to-talk-about-it
It's hard for journalists to talk about climate change, but they need to keep telling the story, especially when writing about natural disasters.“Knee-high by the Fourth of July” is the old saw about the height of corn in the rural irrigated parts of Colorado where it’s grown. But this year, hurried on by the hot weather, the stalks stood waist-high to my 6-foot-2 frame by the summer solstice –– nearly two weeks before the Fourth arrived.

We have had many such episodes of fecundity this year. Peaches are two weeks early. Dragonflies have swarmed in my suburban neighborhood, and, of course, we’ve had these huge wildfires.

Do we credit and/or blame global warming? And, more specifically, is that warming caused by humans? The conventional answer of climate scientists is that we’re still too close to see anything clearly; we can discern climate change only in the rearview mirror.

That rearview mirror clearly shows that the climate is warming, and it is consistent with models assembled to predict the effects of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows from 1999 to 2009 across the continental United States, according to a 2009 analysis led by Gerald Meehl, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

But weather extremes -- droughts and deluges, heat waves and hurricanes -- are trickier. The abnormal events are harder to pick out from what climate scientists call the background noise of historic variability.

Some scientists, most prominently Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, argue that extreme weather events have moved beyond the range of historic variability. For him, we have already amassed enough rearview perspectives to draw conclusions; now, he wants other climate scientists to stride more briskly up to the lectern and admit that the statistical evidence has become compelling. We are, he says, already in a new, human-altered normal, the human-influenced geological epoch that many scientists call the anthropocene.

Do journalists also have a responsibility to connect the dots of today’s weather with broad climatic shifts? And should we further link today’s weather with the accumulating greenhouse gas emissions that most scientists say are heating the globe?

A watchdog group called Media Matters recently examined the question within the context of how wildfires in the West are being reported. The group found that CNN, the Wall Street Journal and other national news outlets rarely mentioned climate change.

Media Matters then asked nine wildfire experts whether the media should include climate change in reporting on forest fires. Almost all said yes.

“Absolutely, journalists who care to look at the bigger picture should be stating that we already are seeing an acceleration of Western wildfire activity in the last 30 (years), and some of that acceleration is tied to the trend of earlier snowmelt and hotter, drier summers,” responded Steven W. Running, director of the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group at the University of Montana. “If the media do not connect these dots, the public probably assumes these latest events are only natural variability and ‘bad luck,’ when in reality they are a glimpse into a more common future if carbon emissions continue to rise.”

Two of the nine experts dissented. “Even the big fires currently blazing away are within the range of historic climates,” said Steven J. Pyne, of Arizona State University. “My personal evaluation of the situation is that we do not currently know enough to make reliable predictions about how global warming will impact future fires,” added Jon E. Keeley of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center.

None of the experts denied the existence of climate change, nor their belief of human complicity in it. Rather, the disagreement was about how much certainty we have about human causes when we talk about this heat wave, that drought, or those wildfires.

That’s the problem with the story of global warming. We want specificity in black-and-white, not nuance. It’s like being in 1939, with war clouds gathering, but Pearl Harbor still ahead.

Computer climate models are predicting much of what is occurring: warming temperatures, ebbing sea ice in the Arctic, rising sea levels. That’s worrisome. But here in the Interior West, we have a very thin record of what constitutes normal, both in terms of temperatures and precipitation. Consider the 30-year megadroughts of 900 years ago that may have caused the Ancestral Pueblo people to abandon their cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. That was long before humans started burning fossil fuels. Yet an entire civilization collapsed, and its people dispersed.

Humans crave the simple stories of winners and losers, saints and sinners. Too, we live in the moment of yesterday’s box scores and tonight’s big game. Climate challenge, with all of its uncertainties, great risks and the need to look far into the future, is a difficult story to tell. The nuances are difficult to distill into two sentences that get inserted into a story about today’s weather or this summer’s corn crop. Yet try we must.

Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He reports about environmental issues from Denver.